Girl From The North Country

Wales Millennium Centre, Cardiff

THE audience at Spring Time for Hitler, in the iconic Mel Brooks film The Producers, were left in jaw dropped, eyes wide staring silent disbelief at what they had witnessed at the start of the show.

I must admit I felt a bit like this as Girl from the North Country unfolded at Cardiff's Millennium Centre. I don't know quite what I'd expected but it certainly wasn't this.

People were still chatting, settling and the house lights up when actors ambled on to the gloomy, smoky stage bringing with them set furniture at the start of this multi-award winning production.

Written and directed by Conor McPherson with music and lyrics by Bob Dylan, it's billed as a show about family and love which reimagines legendary Bob Dylan songs 'like you've never heard them before'. I've never heard any of Bob's songs presented like this before and I've been listening for quite some time.

It's grim. It's gritty. It's dark. It's unrelenting.

This play with songs is set in a failing guesthouse in Duluth, Minnesota. Employing a range of American accents, it depicts the deep depression of 1930s America - deprivation, racism, mental illness, unemployment, bankruptcy, foreclosure and the hopeless despair and loneliness of old age.

And if that's not enough for you, spoiler alert, there's no happy ending. Is it a mirror of our times and our own end game? I really hope not.

The cast, to an actor, is superb. The choreography is faultless and stage shifting and interplay is breath taking. The singing from the entire crew, including Newport's Owen Lloyd making his professional debut, is awesome from start to finish. The musicians, The Howlin' Winds, often wandering the stage with violin, mandolin, guitars and double bass, are outstanding.

It ends almost as casually and unexpectedly and, yes, gloomily, as it starts.

A large section of the sizeable audience stood and applauded. Some, like me, were perhaps too stunned to stand. Still taking it all in, sat alone with their thoughts, like a rolling stone...

The show runs until Saturday, December 10

DB